Achieving Patient Experience Excellence Through Cultural Transformation And The Key To Sustainable Improvements - Beyond Philosophy

Online, May 24, 2012 (Newswire.com) - At the recent Beryl Institute conference on Patient Experience, Rhonda Dishongh, Director of Patient Experience Design at Memorial Hermann Hospital System and I presented a case brief on our work there. This time, our talk was focused on "Achieving patient experience excellence through cultural transformation". Rhonda was keen to get the message out that the key to sustainable improvements in Patient experience and therefore patient satisfaction is cultural transformation. This transformation has to be organic - grown and nurtured from the inside. It will not happen simply by mandate. You will not make it happen by creating great sounding policy alone.

If you boil it all down, there are four key ingredients to successful cultural transformation:

• Leadership - The leaders are required to demonstrate and set the stage for the transformation. They need to be servant leaders - leaders who live the new culture's values. The Servant Leader was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader.

• Motivation - The trick is to get employees to be internally motivated. One of the benefits of the healthcare sector is that many of the workers in the sector are there because they wanted to make a difference. They feel there is a greater purpose than just earning a nice pay check. Patient experience transformation works in your favour in this light. It just needs to be translated as such. What does not work is external based motivation- money and management by fear and intimidation are external motivators. They can generate behavioural change (often negative) but in isolation they never produce positive sustainable cultural transformation.

• Coaching - The central method of showing the way is about micro teaching that can occur organically throughout the workday. These of course can and should be bolstered by workshops or classroom based modules but the emphasis should be placed on the coaching opportunities. In fact, one of the markers of the transformation is that the coaching culture is adopted by employees outside of management.

• Measurement - It is obvious you will have HCHAPS as one source of measurement but that is a mandated outcome metric you want to improve. You need interim local metrics as well to give direction to the change. It is these local metrics that alert you to opportunities to coach, compliment and correct in-between HCHAPS scoring.

If you are interested in more specifics on how these four elements played out at Memorial Hermann Hospital Stem, you may wish to attend a free webinar; 'Achieving Patient Experience Excellence through Cultural Transformation' on Thursday June 28th. Register here to hear Rhonda and I speak in more depth about this subject.